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About Old Man Goya

In 1792, when he was forty-seven, the Spanish painter Francisco de Goya contracted an illness that left him stone deaf. Yet he continued to interact with the world and to create, spending the next thirty-five years in a world emptied of sound but bursting with images of pageantry, cruelty, and pathos.

In this brilliant, idiosyncratic book – a kaleidoscope of biography, memoir, history, and meditation – Julia Blackburn vividly imagines the artist’s world during this time. She recreates the artist’s friendships and love affairs and breathes life into the subjects of his paintings: an ethereally lovely duchess; the spoiled grotesques of the Bourbon court; the atrocities of the Napoleonic wars. Old Man Goya is a rare work of empathy and imagination, a stunning portrait of the mind and life of a great artist.

About Old Man Goya

In 1792, when he was forty-seven, the Spanish painter Francisco de Goya contracted a serious illness that left him stone deaf. In this extraordinary book, Julia Blackburn follows Goya through the remaining thirty-five years of his life. It was a time of political turmoil, of war, violence, and confusion, and Goya transformed what he saw around him into visionary paintings, drawings, and etchings. These were also years of tenderness for Goya, of intimate relationships with the Duchess of Alba and with Leocadia, his mistress, who accompanied him to the end.

Blackburn’s singular distinction as a biographer is her uncanny ability to create a kaleidoscope of biography, memoir, history, and meditation—to think herself into another world. In Goya she has found the perfect subject. Visiting the towns Goya frequented, reading the revelatory letters that he wrote for years to a boyhood friend, investigating the subjects he portrayed, Julia Blackburn writes about the elderly painter with the intimacy of an old friend, seeing through his eyes and sharing the silence in his head.

With unprecedented immediacy and illumination, Old Man Goya gives us an unparalleled portrait of the artist.

About Julia Blackburn

JULIA BLACKBURN is the author of several books of nonfiction, including Old Man Goya, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and With Billie, which won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award; and of the novels The Book of Color and The Leper’s Companions, both of which were short-listed for… More about Julia Blackburn

About Julia Blackburn

JULIA BLACKBURN is the author of several books of nonfiction, including Old Man Goya, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and With Billie, which won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award; and of the novels The Book of Color and The Leper’s Companions, both of which were short-listed for… More about Julia Blackburn

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Praise

“Extraordinary . . . Throughout, the writer’s evocations of Goya’s work are not just intensely visual but virtually audible . . . Blackburn writes to startling effect.” —The New York Times

“[Blackburn’s] real talent is in conjuring up lives . . . You have the uncanny sensation that you have met Goya, felt his honest horny hands, watched him work.” —The Economist

“[Blackburn’s] rare imagination and profound intelligence . . . carry her into the mind and the work of Francisco de Goya . . . Each image, exquisite in its plainness, draws us first into the landscape, then into the past, a process Blackburn repeats until we are mesmerized.” —The Boston Globe

“[A] singular, empathetic homage….Blackburn’s attempt to see with Goya’s eyes…is most successful and moving. . . .She writes like a painter of still lives.” —The Observer (London)